Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'
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When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
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I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.
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You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we're all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise.
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Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don't want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.
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I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.
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Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.
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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.
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I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
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If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.
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I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
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I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.
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That artists are called to be more responsible and 'true' is a tip of hat to their power.
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.
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Identity is an assemblage of constellations.
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Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.
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I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.
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We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.
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My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth.